Ericsson seals deal with Chungwa Telecom for NB-IoT technology

Ericsson has announced it will be building a NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) system for Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan’s largest integrated telecommunications services company.

According to Ericsson, this will enable the island to take its first steps toward joining the Internet of Things (IoT), with Chungwa Telecomin using the system to trial a range of IoT devices and applications in its laboratory.

Ericsson affirms NB-IoT is a 3GPP standards-based Low Power Wide Area technology that offers significant improvements in areas such as deep indoor coverage, power consumption, device complexity, system capacity and spectrum efficiency.

The end-to-end NB-IoT solution developed for Chunghwa Telecom will be built upon a number of Ericsson offerings including the Ericsson Radio System, Massive IoT radio access network (RAN) software, virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), virtual Subscriber Data Management (vSDM), and the IoT Smart Device and Application service on the AppIoT platform.

Chungwa Telecom will be equipped to explore massive machine type communication use cases and bring new services to market at a rapid pace due the vEPC being deployed as a dedicated IoT Packet Core using network slicing functionality.

“This agreement represents a real milestone for both companies, and shows that we have made rapid progress since signing a 5G memorandum of understanding during Mobile World Congress 2017,” says Håkan Cervell, president of Ericsson Taiwan.

“Together we will identify 5G use cases and applications for the digital transformation of industry verticals such as transportation and utilities.”

Executive vice president of Chungwa Telecom and president of Telecommunication Laboratories, Chen Shyang-Yih shares these sentiments.

“Ericsson has long been our leading network provider and has demonstrated the strong device life-cycle management and integration capabilities that are required for a system of this type,” says Shyang-Yih.

“NB-IoT technology is one of our primary focuses in 2017, and we are keen to explore more opportunities based on the new technology.”